Harvest Monday 7/28/14

Someday I will stop changing my blog banner!  I can't seem to settle on a design.  At the moment this banner makes me happy, we'll see what next week brings.

Anyway, I thought last week as a big week with 42 lbs.  Well, this week broke the record set last week.  This week's harvest was 66 lbs!

Here's some of the harvests that are taking over my kitchen:

I finally harvested a cabbage head.  This is the biggest head while the rest of the cabbage are tiny.  I probably should just stick to cabbage as a fall crop instead of trying to plant it in the spring.

The biggest harvest this week was tomatoes at almost 28 lbs.  I've made two batches of tomato sauce and eaten plenty of tomato salads this week.  The runner-up crop of the week is cucumbers at almost 14 lbs.  I have made 26 jars of pickles this season!  The cucumber plants are starting to die and I think I'm ready for the cucumber and pickling marathon to end.  We have had plenty of cucumber salads too.

I did get one nice ear of corn that I promptly cooked and devoured.  My late planted corn may produce more than the early corn.  The stalks are still short, but the ears seem to be filling in more on some of the stalks. The summer squash has slowed down to just a few per week.

The peppers, however, have picked up production:

I'm not much of a hot pepper fan.  I usually plant one or two hot banana peppers for J and then plant lots of sweet bell peppers.  Well, it appears I have seven hot banana pepper plants this year!  So what happened?  I had these seeds that were labeled as Cubanella.  It was my first time growing them, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but I knew they were supposed to be sweet peppers.  Well, they started growing and they looked like banana peppers and then I tasted them.. definitely not sweet!  I'm guessing I got sent the wrong pepper seeds.  Now I have no clue what to do with all these banana peppers.  J likes them on pizza, but that's a ton of pizza to keep up with the pepper production.  I've been giving them to the neighbors and I might pickle some.  Any thoughts on what to do with lots of banana peppers?

Also this week I picked the first of the winter squash, two butternuts.

I have been complaining recently that my harvest basket just couldn't keep up with the garden, so my mom sent me a much larger wire basket.  It can handle all the tomatoes and even the melons.  I have still been on a melon binge.  They are just so delicious and juicy that once I cut into them, I can't stop eating.

Weekly harvests (lbs):

Lettuce 0.04
Onion 0.41
Summer squash   3.19
Peppers 7.42
Cucumber  13.89
Beans 0.81
Carrots 0.83
Tomatoes  27.71
Corn         0.29
Melons 7.71
Cabbage 1.92
Winter squash 1.59

Weekly total: 66.1 lbs
Yearly total: 220.75 lbs (surpassed the 200 lb mark this week!)

That's all the harvests coming from my garden this week.  To see what others are harvesting check out Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions.